WoW – More fun together!

Drama is funny…

I got to be an on-the-sidelines popcorn muncher for a couple bits of drama this week and it really made me appreciate how our guild handles things. First, on Tuesday I took my paladin to the third guild raid, the one that’s trying to get off the ground. Counting my paladin, we had two healers and we really needed three, so Jhudora the raid leader went and found us a resto druid somewhere.

Three or so months ago, I was short a healer for our raid. We’d brought in a friend of Karius from her old guild to tank, and he suggested we invite a rather new guildie of his, Jhudora. I did and she fit in great right away. Then it turned out she lives in the same town as me. So when I convinced her to be a part of our raid group, I hoped she’d move over to our guild. It took a few weeks but she eventually did. Yay!

Now she was raid leading, on her other healer, the one that doesn’t raid with us. And bringing in another non-guildie healer that none of us knew. I inspected the druid; ok gear, good stats, and a respectable spec. The night before I’d run with a resto druid who had a 2/0/39 spec. I didn’t even know it was possible to put 39 points into resto.

Anyway this druid was really good, and we downed Magmaw, Omnom, Maloriak, and 4 winds and would have got Halfus but ran out of time. Jhudora invited the druid back for Thursday, and throughout the raid we’d made remarks about her being welcome to come to our guild, we’re always looking for good players.

At the time the druid said no, she couldn’t do that, she even knew some of her guildies in real life.

Wednesday afternoon I log on and the first thing I see in guild chat is someone’s achievement. The second thing I see is that druid saying “Grats”.

I ask what happened and she said her guild yelled at her for raiding with us and so she gquit. Now, I don’t know any details. But I do know that she had only killed Magmaw and Halfus before coming with us, had seen some Omnomtron, but nothing else. The guild she was in wasn’t very advanced at all. Did she blow off her guild to raid with us? Did she get saved to something she wanted down? No idea. But whoever handled the situation in her guild, did it wrong, because they lost a very skilled healer.

Then later that evening I’m hanging out doing archeology and I start getting whispers from a new guildie, someone we’ve been raiding with, wanting advice. He’d just run a low-level guildie through a dungeon and the other guildie was asking for more runs, and gold. I’m not an officer but I am the new guy’s raid leader so I guess he felt comfortable asking me. I told him not to give the gold over, and then let an officer know what was going on. That officer hopped in vent with me and the kid and got the story, made sure everything was ok, and let us know that it would get passed up the chain and dealt with. And that no, nobody ever had to give anyone else money.

Now, we’ve had guild drama. Bad guild drama, and recently. Several times people have been removed or /gquit in a huff due to drama. But what I’ve seen is that the officers and our guild leader Troutwort are willing to take time and work on drama. They try really hard to be fair but when it comes down to following the stated rules or keeping a long term guildie, they follow the rules. Which to me is essential. If you don’t do that, you don’t have rules, you have anarchy.

Any group of more than one person will have drama at some point. The important thing is how you handle it. Crits handles it well. From what I’ve seen, most of the people we’ve lost permanently have been no major loss to the guild. The ones who leave that I wish wouldn’t go, end up coming back. And when other guilds in our orbit have drama, we have a way of absorbing their best and nicest players.

Crits has 450 members. A lot of that is alts; I think it’s a rule that you must have at least four alts to be in Crits. And there’s a lot of inactive members. But if there’s a raid going we often have 20 people online at a time. And even with all those people, I think we’ve had two bouts of drama in the 9 months or so that we’ve been over there. Not bad at all. Good job, Repgrind and Troutwort.

Thanks for the really nice compliments! We do our best to keep drama at a low. I feel REALLY fortunate to know that I can take a weekend off to go fishing and if something comes up, the officers or other leaders (remember you don’t have a title to be a leader) will deal with it as best as possible. Plus many of them have my number, though I suppose I should refresh that incase anyone lost it.

But given the facts of he said she said we try to treat everyone as fairly as possible to mitigate damage and potential /gquits as those always make people freak out. We have lost some people permanently, but those that temporarily leave and come back because the grass wasn’t greener really makes me feel good about how we do things and handle things here. We learn and continue to learn from each bit of drama. These are pretty small incidents, but drama depends on two things: one: people reporting it, and two: people responding to it. I’m not online all the time so the fact that this new guildie felt comfortable to tell someone about what they didn’t like is the first step to mitigation.

I’ve been trying to talk some of them into it, but so far I’ve had little luck. Most weren’t in the fortunate position that I was in, of already having multiple level 80s on both factions to start with. And I can’t blame them for not wanting to part with an alt that may have tradeskills they will miss. I’ll keep workin on them though. 😀

You may be able to convince Falahla to level a toon on horde. we have a bunch of toons in the 60ish range that can be power leveled. I even have some farm toons that are near 80 that I could give her. Whats in range of hitting 85 in about a week is a DK, druid, shammy, pally, and lock. If you really sweet talk her she might be able to have a raid geared shadow priest, but then I’ll have to level enchanting and alchemy again.

I don’t know that he *wants* to pass any character over but he does owe me a character since I gave him my level 76 hunter. So even if not Eltard, I’m getting someone. We already have to account transfer- no biggie to tack on a realm transfer and faction change….

Thanks Bo!! I feel sad I feel like i haven’t seen you around lately, though I’ve been so busy as of late it seems. 😛

But I appreciate the compliment! And you contribute plenty, we’ll get you there. I think the guild needs those people that focus on raiding as much as it needs those that seek out every achievement and mini-pet. I think those players are just as valuable for knowledge of what the game offers, plus, it’s a constant reminder to us all of things we might want to do. Heck, if you hadn’t linked some of the pets and things you’ve gotten, I probably wouldn’t know they existed!

Heck yeah. A well rounded guild is a healthy guild. I was just reading some other blogs and thinking that it seems like some other guilds ARE their raid and their raid is the guild. We are three successful raids right now none of which are ‘offical’ ‘guild raids’ or anything like that. Probably if we were really hardcore we could merge them all and have one single raid 5 nights a week with more bosses down… but that is just not our speed. We like alts and we like pets and we like multiple raids and guild events and FUN. If everyone plays in the way they personally enjoy then we all have more fun.

By the way, Once the 4.2 raid is out and the srsbzns progression moves over there we are likely to have more ‘gear the alts’ runs in the current raids with whoever wants to come. Not sure how that will go or who will run it but that is something to look foward too for those that are more casual with their raiding.